Heart disease & stroke combined is Ireland’s biggest killer. A frightening statistic that the Irish Heart Foundation needed to significantly decrease through impactful re-energised branding and messaging. We helped this national charity articulate and visualize their mission, thus addressing this national crisis and help save lives.

We created

Identity

Brand Strategy

Brand Architecture

Design & Art Direction

Communications

Advertising

Irish Heart

Confronting Ireland’s Biggest Killer

Connected Hearts

The Irish Heart Foundation found they were largely misunderstood by the Irish public. Our key insight to tackle this and inspire change was to connect emotionally with people and move away from fear based to hope based messaging. Emotionally all of our lives are connected. Losing someone you love can bring an unbearable weight, and it's a weight we wouldn't want to impose on those we love. The new identity conveys this idea visually as connected hearts. By looking after our own heart we look after the heart of our loved ones in turn thus reigniting passion for the cause.

The brand communicates a message of hope, positivity and motivation, rather than fear, anxiety and death.

Messaging with impact

There is a lot we can all do to reduce our risk of heart attack and stroke. This message needed to be communicated loud and clear in an accessible way. The team also wanted to make all messaging less governmental in tone, less use of jargon and introduce more warmth. Our first step was to make the name more accessible by removing the word ‘Foundation’. We then underpinned the simplified name with its core purpose of empowering longer lives with ‘Let’s live life better’, emphasising that living a healthy life prolongs life and makes it more enjoyable.

To build an iconic brand, we needed to expand Irish Heart’s core identity, with a broader set of elements that help connect and engage with everyone. We combined arrows, speech balloons, colour and snappy copy to create messages that would reach out, inform and inspire the nation. An iconic, infinitely flexible design system that anchors various activities from fundraising to research to prevention initiatives.

Uniting Stroke

Globally, people are unaware that Heart disease and Stroke are connected. This was a huge challenge to overcome. With the heart and brain being the body’s two most vital organs, the task was to connect Stroke with Heart disease without creating a separate identity. A brand identity was needed that would accurately connect the two, yet still offer hope and encourage people to act.

We are the first charity in Ireland that has moved away from campaigns based around fear, to building a brand that connects more deeply with everyone, reigniting passion for our cause.

Caroline Cullen, Communications Manager, Irish Heart

We are on course to be one of the most unhealthy countries in the world. The organisation has set itself a mission of reducing heart disease and stroke by 25% by 2025. This is a deeply ambitious goal but we now have an iconic and instantly recogniseable brand that connects and articulates our mission, thanks to Alkamee.